Recounting the Dead: From the Civil War to Afghanistan

Wars have a way of making us lose count. What should be the most quantifiable—life and death; the beginning and the end; what it cost—can be the points of greatest dispute. This week, the Times reported on a new consensus among historians that about a hundred and twenty thousand more soldiers died in the Civil War than we had, for a century, assumed. The old number, 618,222, had an alluring precision, which turns out to have more or less been nonsense, at least on the Southern side. And the new number, 752,000? J. David Hacker, the historian who did the latest recount, published in the journal Civil War History, notes that even that might be very far off: the “data set point to as many as 851,000 deaths.” But we’re closer now, to them and to the story of what happened.

Hacker counted the casualties in a number of archival and statistically sophisticated ways. The rough heart of it, though, was looking at the 1860 and 1870 censuses, and seeing who was alive in one and dead in the other. This wasn’t simple, and involved questions like the relative death rates of native and foreign-born men, and just how corrupt census-takers were in 1870. Hacker also can’t solve all questions about civilian casualties, particularly the deaths of black women. They are thought to have died disproportionately; the invisibility of those numbers is haunting.

It is reassuring to think that the dead wouldn’t be as lost now—that this was all a matter of nineteenth-century darkness—if it weren’t for the blanknesses in our accounting of far more recent wars. A few days before Hacker’s paper was publicized, workers building a highway near Hanoi uncovered a mass grave with thirty bodies in it. The men seem to have died in the Tet Offensive, an action, in 1968, that made clear that we would be fools to count our success in terms of bodies—by that measure, we would have won. Sometimes those figures measure nothing but plain, personal loss. (The first tally of the Civil War dead was adjusted in the immediate postwar years when widows and orphans came looking for help.) Now we know how many of our own soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan; there were a few more this week. But the estimates for the number of Iraqis who died after our invasion are all over the place, from a hundred thousand to a million. There isn’t even an agreement on what dates our complicity in those deaths begins and ends, or at least diminishes. The same is true in Afghanistan, where some of the bitterest arguments have been about what column on the ledger to count a body in: civilian, militant, friend.

Money seems less important than lives, but our approach to that, too, has been shockingly casual. We don’t like to think about what wars cost; it seems small. The logical consequences of that can be seen in Congressman Paul Ryan’s recent budget, which treats defense spending as a sacrosanct blob. The effect, as James Surowiecki explains, would be to make much of the rest of the government disappear. (For more on the Ryan speech, see John Cassidy’s post as well as mine, over at Daily Comment, where I write on Wednesdays.)

There are other unfinished reckonings. On Wednesday, five men, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were referred for trial for the murder of almost three thousand people more than ten years ago—except that it isn’t really a trial, it’s a military commission. It’s easy to lose track of the number of delays and quasi-judicial rationalizations that have brought us to this juncture. For the moment, though, the referral starts a countdown: there must be an arraignment within thirty days.

As it happened, Hacker’s paper was released the same week we all got a look at the raw reports that made up the 1940 census; one wonders what demographers might use that data to establish in a hundred years. John Seabrook wrote about looking for his grandparents’ names in the digital images of the handwritten logs, and about how finding them felt a little like redemption. Reading that, I went looking for one of my grandfathers, too, and found him, at age seventeen, living with his widowed mother, a couple of years before he was sent off to war. He came back.

Photograph: courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.

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